Which French Revolutionary figure thought black slaves could oversee monkeys for labor?
score:6
There are many mentions from French Enlightenment writers, which is not the same as Revolutionary, but I think more adequate to what you are looking for. This is because influences of Linnaeus and Buffon:
- Abbé Sièyes: he came to conceive a new working race from the crossing of Negroes with monkeys. See more on his text "Reasoned Exposition of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)". I do not have access to this source, but this is probably what you are looking for.1
- Voltaire: this is different to what you're looking for. But in a similar fashion the famous thinker agreed that the race of the Whites was a superior species to that of the Negroes. According to him, Whites were superior to Negroes, and Negroes were "superior to monkeys, like monkeys are [superior] to oysters…" 2
I'm sure you can find more, specially regarding the events of the Haitian Revolution. For example, citations about Napoleon generals in Saint Dominque. Toussaint nickname was the "old black monkey".
Citations
- Seen in Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens (Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804), Chapell Hill, The University of South Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 174-175.
- Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique, Cap. V: “Si l’homme a une âme, et ce que ce peut être”, 1737
Upvote:4
James' answer cleared up a critical factual error I had in my memory of this Frenchman's ideas. It was indeed Abbe Sieyes, but the the hierarchy for labor was different.
I offer the following from A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbe Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Bicentennial Reflections on the French Revolution) by William H Sewell Jr.
...Rather, the Third Estate, the working nation, is made up of "two peoples" who are not united but divided by their labor.
What Sieyes offers as a solution to the troubling duality of the working nation is a rather shocking fantasy: the production of new species of "anthropomorphic monkeys" to accomplish the passive labors," to be supervised by "negroes." This bizarre utopia would return humankind to the conditions of the antique polis of Sparta, where all manual labor would be done by slaves regarded as members of inferior species, and all the whites would be "directors of work" — which would give them the time and means to be educated and to become active and intelligent citizens. Manual production would no longer be carried out by two white peoples, but by five peoples, alternately called "races" or "species": whites, blacks, and three types of anthropomorphic monkeys.
It is notable that Sieyes cites as the advantage of this arrangement not that it would increase the supply of labor and hence material goods. The advantage is more moral than material: the inferior species would have "fewer needs" and above all would be "less capable of exciting human compassion." They could be exploited, in other words, with a clear conscience. The exploitable inferior species seem to include, for Sieyes, blacks as well as anthropomorphic monkeys. Without discussing the question, he places Africans in a position intermediate between whites and monkeys, and the fact that they would be mere "auxiliary instruments of labor" under guidance of the white citizen "heads of production" apparently causes him no moral anxiety.
(Chapter 5, "What is the Citizen? The Denial of Political Equality", pg. 155)
Utterly astounding.
This was the source I was looking for. Kudos to James for nailing the reference.
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